(Im-)Balance

There are so many imbalances all over the world. I therefore chose to focus just on two main ones whereas the first certainly impacts the second in one way or another: Population and Climate.

(Im-)Balance: Population

How many people can live on planet earth? Sir David Frederick Attenborough explains his possible answers.

The capacity of our environment to provide space and supply energy (incl. food) is limited.

In 2013, Sir David Frederick Attenborough said if humans did not control population, the natural world would and in 2018, he stated in an interview with the BBC’s Newsnight, that slowing population growth is key to saving the planet.

By 2025, world population will probably be over 8 billion people. Around 2040, it could hit 9 billion and by 2100, it could reach a massive 11 billion people.

World Population

Growth Box By Box

Hans Rosling: Global population growth, box by box

Fascinating, impressive, scary, isn’t it? The Chinese might have been (past tense!) on the right track with their one-child policy. The world’s population will grow to 9 billion over the next 50 years – and only by raising the living standards of the poorest can we check population growth. This is the paradoxical answer by Prof. Hans Rosling

Hans Rosling was a professor of international health at Karolinska Institute and was the co-founder and chairman of the Gapminder Foundation, which developed the Trendalyzer software system.

Gapminder was founded in 2005 by Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund, and Hans Rosling. The name Gapminder was derived from the “Mind the Gap” warning messages on the London Underground

“Nature doesn’t need people – people need nature; nature would survive the extinction of the human being and go on just fine, but human culture, human beings, cannot survive without nature.”
– Harrison Ford

(Im-)Balance: Climate

James Edward Hansen is an American adjunct professor and speaks out about climate change.

Weather is what the forecasters on the TV news predict each day. They tell people about the temperature, cloudiness, humidity, and whether a storm is likely in the next few days. That’s weather! It is the mix of events that happens each day in our atmosphere.

Climate on the other hand is the average weather in a place over many years. While the weather can change in just a few hours, climate takes hundreds, thousands, even millions of years to change.

The earth’s climate has the power to shape the history of the world is a known fact. It can biologically, culturally and geographically alter the basics of the planet. However over the last century it was realized that even human activities can alter the climate to a great extent. During the past 100 years, global average surface temperature increased by about 0.7 °C resulting in climate change.

Our planet, Earth, is facing severe climate imbalances due to the extended abuse during the past few centuries. The average temperature of the planet has a predicted rise of up to 5 °C over the next century due to climate change. These temperature change can prove to be very dangerous in the future. Global warming is an issue haunting several countries of the world. With the constant increase of greenhouse gases the situation is expected to worsen.

Emissions Trading

As everything in life is about money, climate and protection thereof has also been turned into a business. Emissions trading or cap and trade is a government-mandated, market-based approach to controlling pollution by providing economic incentives for achieving reductions in the emissions of pollutants.

You may want to calculate and offset your CO2 emissions here.

Sustainability

“By the time we see that climate change is really bad, your ability to fix it is extremely limited. The carbon gets up there, but the heating effect is delayed. And then the effect of that heat on the species and ecosystem is delayed. That means that even when you turn virtuous, things are actually going to get worse for quite a while.”
– Bill Gates